November 9, 2012

CORAZONLAND:

Hispanic migration to the Midwest has political implications. Though only 2.2% of eligible voters in Iowa are Latinos, President courted them. He won in five out of seven counties that together are home to half of Iowa's Latino population. The president also won in Wapello County, where Ottumwa is the county seat. Nationally, Hispanics accounted for 10% of the electorate for the first time, and helped power Mr. Obama to victory.

The "Latino Diaspora" is playing a key role in revitalizing small-town America once plagued with a shrinking tax base and dim prospects for economic growth.

Since the 1990s, Latinos have flocked to places like Dalton, Ga., to work in the carpet mills, and to the Piedmont section of North Carolina to work in furniture manufacturing. Many Hispanics work in the hotels and golf courses of Hilton Head, S.C. Some analysts believe the influx could eventually tip more traditionally Republican Southern states into the Democratic column.

The big Hispanic movement to Midwestern small towns has been more recent. Between 2000 and 2010, the Hispanic population in the Midwest swelled 49%, more than 12 times the 4% overall population growth there, according to the census.

The number of Latinos climbed 82% in Iowa during that decade and now represents 5% of the state's population, the census found. The Hispanic population grew 82% in Indiana, 77% in Nebraska and 74.5% in Minnesota. Beardstown, Ill., now holds a Cinco de Mayo celebration with mariachi bands and children performing Mexican folk dances across from the courthouse where Abraham Lincoln practiced law.

BECOMING CONSERVATIVE:

Sean Hannity said Thursday he has "evolved" on immigration and now supports a "pathway to citizenship."

Hannity told his radio listeners Thursday afternoon that the United States needs to "get rid of the immigration issue altogether."

"It's simple to me to fix it," Hannity said. "I think you control the border first. You create a pathway for those people that are here -- you don't say you've got to go home. And that is a position that I've evolved on. Because, you know what, it's got to be resolved. The majority of people here, if some people have criminal records you can send them home, but if people are here, law-abiding, participating for years, their kids are born here, you know, first secure the border, pathway to citizenship, done."

...AND CHEAPER...:

Moore's Law Is Becoming Irrelevant : The CEO of ARM says power-efficient chips for mobile devices will move into desktops, laptops, and servers. (Tom Simonite, November 9, 2012, Technology Review)

Companies like Apple and Samsung are the public face of the smartphone and tablet boom, but they all rely on ARM, the British company that licenses the energy-efficient processor designs required by mobile devices. Those chips were once considered significantly less powerful than the x86 processors found in desktops, laptops, and servers--a market dominated by Intel--but that gap appears to be closing. Microsoft is exploring a switch to ARM's technology for traditional computers, suggesting that ARM's technology will soon shape more than just mobile computing. ARM's CEO, Warren East, met this week with MIT Technology Review's senior IT editor, Tom Simonite.

For decades the computing business has been guided by Moore's Law, which predicts the rate of improvements in computing power. You have a different focus.

We have always been about efficiency, miles per gallon instead of top speed. That's actually what matters. Mobile is an easy example: you know that phone is constrained because it's battery powered.

But [even if] you can plug [a computer] into a socket, [efficiency] is a serious issue for the world. Servers use huge amounts of power. Data centers get located in strange regions of the world where it's naturally cooler. More and more of this mobile stuff [also] means more and more servers are required. We've actually changed the way people design servers [by making them smaller and lower-powered]. Instead of being restricted to big data centers where you know you can get massive amounts of power in, you can distribute these things. You could have many more servers. The analogy I would use is routers. Once upon a time, routers were effectively mini-computers in a massive box. Cisco managed to reduce that to things you have in your home. There's no reason it shouldn't go that way for servers.

REPUBLICAN AMERICA:

The addition of at least one governorship to the GOP column brings the party's tally to 30 and marks the highest number held by either party in 12 years, according to the Republican Governors Association. The all-time high for the GOP was 34 seats in the 1920s.

Reinforcing the Republican lead in governorships strengthens the party's position against Democratic policies such as Obamacare, a CNN report noted, and arms the GOP with influence in Washington, despite the fact the White House will be blue for another four years and the GOP failed in its mission to capture the Senate.